OK, I’ve just added new last.fm music players to both the website frontpage and here on the blog – they’re over on the left hand side there, beneath the links. The main difference between the two is that the one on my site autostarts, the one on the blog doesn’t – I’m guessing that the majority of the visitors to the blog are here to read stuff, not necessarily listen to music, whereas visitors to the stevelawson.net homepage are far more likely to be wanting to hear something straight away. (feel free to discuss the relative merits of autostart music in the comments below – I’m open to persuasion either way. I’m definitely not putting it on on the blog – there are a couple of blogs I just never visit any more because they have music players on them that play all kinds of nonsense that I don’t really want to hear…)
The decision to go with the last.fm embeddable thingie over the reverbnation one was simply that the last.fm one was portrait and the reverbnation ones are all landscape, but not landscape enough for them to work in the main body of my site – if they did one that was 500px wide and about 80px high, I’d have probably gone for that on the website front page, but just wanted something a little tidier.
So, have a listen! Go on, you know you want to. If you do want to listen to the stuff that’s on the reverb nation page, you can do so with the player below – there are a few live things on there that are unavailable anywhere else…
Do those of you that have music pages use any other embedded widgets? Do tell…
I just watched the following video on Myspace – a hilarious clip of Fred Armisen going for an audition that he clearly has no place being at –
And it reminded me of when I did a very similar thing, albeit slightly more unwittingly. Back in about 1996/97, I had just moved back to London from Lincoln, and was just about eking out a living teaching (still driving back up to Lincoln one day a week) and living in a house where I was sharing a room as that’s all I could afford.
A friend of mine who had just left a gig as an on-stage musician in the west end told me that they were auditioning for the role of Buddy Holly’s bassist in ‘Buddy!’ the musical, and suggested I go for it. He seemed to think that the fact that I’d spent less than 10 minutes in my life with a double bass in my hands, couldn’t really sing and had no clue how to do an american accent wasn’t going to be a hindrance and that I should go for it.
So I went round to a friend’s house to try her double bass, did about 15 minutes and thought ‘that’ll do’. And then worked out two songs to sing, which were (I shit you not), ‘Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night’ and ‘I Fought The Law’, both with electric bass accompaniment (despite there being no electric bass in the show).
The audition itself, fortunately, was a one at a time affair, not a big casting call. So I went in, onto the stage, with two blokes sat in the audience, plugged in my bass, and played (well) and sang (terribly) my two songs, then they said ‘can you play some double bass for us?’, so I picked up the double bass that was on the stage. It had action a mile high, and felt like a different scale length to the one I’d tried. I played a couple of really shitty rock ‘n’ roll walking basslines – I must’ve sounded like some 12 year old in a music shop, trying an instrument he’d never played…
They called me down to where they were sat, and gave me a script to read ‘it’s a southern US accent we need’. So I launch into it, trip over the words, get the emphasis wrong, and worst of all drift from really appalling new york jewish accent to californian surf-bum and back to ridiculous cowboy. The kind of american accent that makes Dick Van Dyke’s cockney sound like he grew up in Plaistow.
Thinking back, I’m surprised they didn’t either laugh or punch me in the face for wasting their time.
The only other time I’d ever felt quite so HOPELESSLY out of my depth was my audition for Salford University when I was 18. I’d driven down to Manchester the night before, so Martin and I could go and see Ocean Colour Scene at the International 3 [side note – this was before their first album came out, and they were, in all seriousness, one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen – hard to believe given the terraces rock they morphed into later…] – we slept in the car, and drove into Manchester the next morning, where I bought my first ever jazz records (a Coltrane live in Europe album called ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, Mingus Plays Duke and a Bill Evans Trio album called ‘Autumn Leaves’ that was actually an edit from ‘Live At The Village Vanguard’…) then went out to Salford for the interview.
I got there and there was a guitar player sat outside the interview room playing King’s X tunes. He was, to me then, amazing. I was REALLY bad at working out songs off records; I had no ear for it at all. So hearing this guy play all this stuff was the first point at which I thought ‘hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t have rated myself quite so highly on their pre-audition questionnaire’.
Anyway, I was eventually called in, played my two solo pieces, REALLY badly – mistakes, out of tune, everything that could have gone wrong short of pissing myself did. They then did an ear test, and I had no idea how to pick out intervals, didn’t know what a compound interval was, bollocksed up the reading test… by this point I half expected then to invoice me for an hour of wasted time… I was asked how I thought it went and said ‘frankly, shit’, and they smiled and said ‘we’ll let you know’.
…fast forward 15 years, and I’ve done two masterclasses at that same uni. So maybe one day I’ll be playing rockabilly slap upright on a west end stage, you never can tell…
It’s the middle of the night, so I’m going to make this quick as I really ought to be asleep, but I was just re-reading my post from earlier, and realised in didn’t get back to talking about the cover versions thing.
This happens LOADS on youtube. There are DREADFUL versions of songs – one drunk dude with an acoustic guitar and a toy camera playing oasis songs – that have had thousands of views. I’m guessing most of those views were about 6 seconds long, but that’s because he couldn’t hold their attention (which after all is the currency in the new economy). But, if you have good cover tunes on youtube, you can piggyback the searches for the person who did the song first time round.
(as an aside, it would be great if Youtube allowed for the uploading of publishing details for songs on youtube, and did a revenue sharing deal with the WRITERS of the songs that get used in such a way… It’s all publicity for the ‘real’ song, but it would seem fair to pay mechanicals on the videos…)
anyway, so much of life online is about piggybacking, but it’s worth giving some thought to the difference between piggybacking and hijacking – if what you’re doing impinges on what someone else is trying to do, that’s hijacking (for example, posting inane non-comments onto people’s myspace pages advertising your gigs, without any reference to them – the online equiv. of shiny colourful junkmail, and a right pain in the arse). Joining in with a thread on a forum about something related to what you’re doing, and posting links as an example would be a more netiquettish way of piggybacking. (of for that matter, posting a myspace comment inviting a particular person to a particular gig, and actually referring to them by name… what a suggestion…)
Anyway, worth thinking about with youtube – there are all kinds of options, including commenting, posting video responses, cover tunes, intelligent tagging of videos and of course the extra-youtube dissemination of info about the vids on forums, myspace, blogs etc…
damn, this was longer than I’d planned – time to sleep…
in the mean time, watch this –
(BTW, I ended yesterday as the 70th most viewed musician on the whole of myspace for the day – that sounds quite good, doesn’t it?)
I’ve just seen that my 2004 album Grace and Gratitude is now available on Amazon.com for download – $8.99 for the whole album, which is less than a fiver if it works from the UK… is that good? ;o)
And in keeping with my current obsession with Youtube, here’s a video of the title track (not the album version :o)
So I’ve been posting loads of Youtube clips in the last couple of days, and have thus been thinking a fair bit about what youtube does for a musician and where it fits.
Firstly, it’s another huge ecosystem to inhabit – so much of the ‘social networking’ scene is about self contained ecosystems. Which can be good and bad – for example, Myspace friend acquisition is largely its own currency – the seeming failure of Snocap to make any real dent in the online sales world seems fundamentally to be because ‘what goes on in myspace stays in myspace’ by and large – the bit of it that extends is gigs. So you build an audience, and some exposure, but that’s through interaction not friend requesting. I saw a page today of a guy with 77,000 friends but only 90 plays today. Contrast that with Lobelia’s page, where she trimmed her friends list down from 4000 to 300 (it’s crept back up to 400 now), but reguarly has 50 plays in a day. 50 plays isn’t a huge amount in myspace terms, but they are more likely to be people actually listening, and the idea that to double that requires another 76,600 friends is clearly laughable.
So, sorry, back to YouTube – it’s another ecosystem that people inhabit. A heck of a lot of people use youtube for ‘one shot listening’ – you think of a classic tune and want to hear it. chuck it into youtube and there’s more than likely a version of it up there, possibly a live one, or one that’s been coupled to a new video, or a bootleg, or often the original video, perfect for nostalgic moments. There are also cover versions (more on that in a moment).
So what do you get? First up you get the ‘human face of music’ – watching a video of someone playing a song live has way more human impact than just downloading an MP3 – you see them react to their own music, you see them smile, frown, close their eyes, twiddle their fingers etc… it’s a secondary level of engagement beyond just listening. Also, there’s the really simple equation that if you watch someone play live, you’re more likely to want to go and see them play live.
For me, the single biggest disconnect between what I do on stage and my records is that my records are generally not noticeably silly or funny. On stage, I talk a lot of bollocks, which most of the people who come and see me play like (I’m sure it’s pissed off the occasional person, especially in london where ‘jazz face’ or indie-indifference are the order of the day, but hey, fuck ’em.) Youtube allows people to see some of that – I can post videos with me talking before the song, or just mucking about mid song…
the other great thing for musicians with youtube is that it’s built to be viral… it’s made for sharing. The videos can be embedded and linked from anywhere, there are widgets for it on every other site, they can be stumbled and digg-ed and facebooked and myspaced, and there’s social capital in sharing cool vids.
For the most part, the marketeers suggest keeping your viral vids to 30 seconds, but that’s the adverts, we’re not interested in selling holidays or washing powder here, this is about connecting with real music… So the viral element will be curtailed slightly, but the quality of the response will no doubt be higher…
The last thing about youtube that’s useful is that extracting the (already massively compressed) audio and ripping it as an MP3 is both time consuming and due to the quality drop, largely pointless, so it’s a great way to dish out low res promo material that is very unlikely to impinge on sales. Unless your videos are purely information-based (I wonder what youtube has done to sales of tuitional DVDs given that so much of that stuff is ripped an uploaded. If I saw something really cool on youtube, I’d be more inclined to head off and buy it. I wonder if they’ll ever incorporate a ‘related link’ option for sales, downloads, websites etc? I guess that would break the wall of the ecosystem…
anyway, please do go and check out the new vids I’ve posted, and go viral with them (or if not viral, at least mildly bacterial) – the video below is getting a lot of traffic, and was up to #14th most viewed UK music video earlier today… so watch it, pass it on, rate it, stumble it, and help me out. :o)
and these are the most recent two that I’ve uploaded. MMFSOG –
If you’ve been enjoying the video clips from today, you can now buy the ‘Steve Lawson and Lobelia live in Nebraska EP’ as a 256kbps (vbr) download from the online shop at stevelawson.net… It’s fab. :o)
